1. Mark at Going Like Sixty gets top billing because he posted about how the now-classic Peace Symbol came to be. Today happens to be the 50th anniversary of the creation of that symbol, which was meant to represent the semaphore codes for the letters N and D for "Nuclear Disarmament". These days, people tend to confuse the peace symbol with the Mercedes Benz logo, since owning a Merc has superseded working for peace in the minds of a lot of Americans. By the same token, Winston Churchill’s "V for Victory" hand gesture was also appropriated by the ’60s youth culture to mean "peace". Churchill originally used the gesture with his fingers turned inward like this:
He turned his hand around after someone worked up the guts to tell him what that gesture actually means (HINT: it ain’t pretty). I imagine more than one American traveling Europe has gotten punched in the snoot by some local misunderstanding this little gesture over the last 40 years.
2. Hollywood has wasted no time since the conclusion of the WGA strike to make sure that quality scripts are being hurried into production. The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Hasbro has signed a movie deal with Universal to make a series of movies based on the classic games "Monopoly", "Battleship", "Candy Land" and "Ouija". What, no Yahtzee?
3. The new five dollar bill is about to be launched. The fiver was one of the first bills to be re-designed back in the 1990s, but this re-design incorporates the various anti-counterfeiting measures that have been instituted in subsequent bill designs including colored ink, microprinting, and watermarking. That should keep the counterfeiters at bay for at least a week.
4. Apparently MSNBC isn’t the only news network engaging in various acts of douchebaggery against Barack Obama. Crooks and Liars reports that the closed-captioning of Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN included a statement that Al Quaeda had called Obama to congratulate him on his primary win in Wisconsin. Cooper himself did not say this, it was just in the captioning, but a lot of public places with televisions turn on the closed-captioning so that patrons can follow a program even if crowd noise drowns out the audio.
5. It’s Official: George W. Bush is the WORST.PRESIDENT.EVAR.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
Thanks for top spot! K8 commented that it makes more sense for fingers to point downward which would more resemble the symbol.